An Evening of Mud with Remi Wolf

If Remi Wolf’s first two albums, 2021’s Juno and 2024’s Big Ideas, were in technicolor, her third LP Mud (out October 9 via Island Records) is more neutral, earthy and grounded. It’s still colorful, as Wolf tends to be, but the newly 30-year-old singer has been on a journey of rooting herself more firmly in the ground. “I feel like I've crossed into a new phase of life because of this album,” she says, sitting in the same basement studio at Electric Lady where most of the album was recorded. “I literally felt like I was covered in shit. And now, at the end of the album process, I feel so clean and clear. It has been a very cleansing record to make for me.” The rawness is delivered in the sound: stripped away of synths and programmed drums, Mud is Remi Wolf at her most lyrically and sonically vulnerable. The songs evoke the feeling of singing around a campfire with just your friends and a couple guitars because that’s how it felt for Wolf to make it. But to find the clearing in the forest, she needed to make a whole new trail first. By the end of 2024, Wolf had been touring for about four years straight. Between opening stints on Halsey, Paramore and Olivia Rodrigo’s arena tours, she started headlining bigger rooms on her own in between. She started thinking about her next album as soon as she wrapped up the first leg of her Big Ideas tour that October, moving with the same urgency and transience she had grown accustomed to over the last several years of her life. But as the touring wound down, Wolf's life had begun to spiral out of control. “This is a breakup record and a Saturn return record,” she explains. “When I started writing the album, I was so emotionally all over the place and in a really unbalanced, bad relationship at the time. I was drinking, I was going through ups and downs on the road, and just got bogged down by a lot of feelings and exhaustion from my twenties.” By March of 2025, her relationship of two and half years had abruptly ended, with her ex claiming he wasn’t that “into” her. Wolf was left to pick up the pieces, coming to terms with the changes she needed to make to live a healthier life. She set off for Big Bear with a trusted crew of songwriters and producers; her frequent collaborators Jared Solomon and Jack DeMeo were joined this time around by Wolf’s sister-in-law Gigi Grombacher, who is also a singer and her new friend Jamie McLaughlin, whom she met during a couple weeks of sessions in Nashville the fall before. Big Bear set the tone for Wolf’s Mud writing process and gave birth to the record’s identity, led by a cozy, familial feeling to their time at the Airbnb they shared together. “I would make dinner for everybody every night and we’d have a family meal,” she recalls. “I’d be making lasagna in the kitchen and we’d be writing at the same time, passing the mic over the counter.” The experience changed how she wrote, allowing all the “emo as fuck” feelings to be poured into her music. “I felt this permission to be honest and be my raw self,” she explains “Because of that, the writing process didn’t change but the writing changed. We became a family band.” While in Big Bear, Wolf cathartically channeled her heartbreak into “I Won’t Cry,” a big, honest power ballad. “I was really fresh out of the absolute wreckage of the relationship,” she says. “I was in a very vulnerable state of feeling deeply unwanted.” The gut punch of a song was the one she recorded while laying sheets of lasagna, belting out the pleading chorus with her friends’ support. “It was the first song I’ve ever written where I felt like if somebody else wrote this song, I’d be like ‘I wish I wrote that song,’” she says. “That song is about this toxic lack of self love and deep sadness, but also simultaneously being at peace that it’s over.” After Big Bear, Wolf and the same squad from the house took three different trips to New York to record the album at Electric Lady. They would all stay at a nearby hotel down the street — their “glampground” — and walk to and from the studio together, exchanging “good nights” and “I love yous” in the elevator. In the basement studio, Wolf began to unlock the sonic palette of Mud before it ever got a name. She wanted live instrumentation, often playing drums herself on a song, and a “muddy” feeling to the production. There’s very little synth on the album, a huge difference from her past releases. “It’s the most minimalist I’ve ever been,” she says. Both “Covered In Mud” and “Bottle” became “lighthouses” for the album. The smooth but lively tracks are as catchy and energetic as Wolf has always been, but you can feel the real down-in-the-dirt sound she was aiming for. The songs hone in on storytelling and deep details above pared down production; on “Mud,” Wolf was playing the drums in Electric Lady while freestyling the lyrics into the microphone. She wrote over 100 songs for the album, picking apart demos and getting in the weeds of the album’s engineering more than ever before. It’s the first record, she says, where she fought for songs, sometimes starting demos over multiple times to get them right. Songs like lead single “Twiggy” and “Burn Me Blue” would go through multiple iterations until she started to crack the sonic code. In January of this year, Wolf and her “family band” took one final trip, this time to Joshua Tree. She was about to turn 30 and nearly six months sober. She wrote one of the final songs for the album, the gorgeous, simple “Moon So High,” on the trip. As it was nearing completion, she realized it should be a duet and DM’d her internet friend John Mayer to hop on it. Towards the end of making Mud, she started to feel an emotion she’s always struggled accessing: gratitude. She felt clearer than ever and like she was finally in the right place at the right time with the right people making the right album.